I'm amassing a list of budget christmas ideas for vinyl lovers. Especially those with extended families who need great gift ideas on sensible budgets. Here are a few on my short list. Add or critique as necessary!

Prices quoted are ballpark and not the lowest I'm sure, just what I happened upon.

No vinyl enthusiast's kit of record-care devices is complete without the Discwasher Zerostat anti-static gun. You can find used ones on ebay for $50 or so; new ones seem to be wildly overpriced, around $100. It uses a piezo-electric crystal which, when you squeeze the trigger, produces a static-canceling charge. No batteries are required.

I still have mine and it works well to eliminate the annoying ticks and pops due to static electicity that build up on vinyl records. Even withdrawing one from a sleeve imparts a static charge, especially in dry winter air.

Ha! I think a certain amount of the appeal of vinyl playback (not for me anymore, thankfully) draws on an O/C component. I used to like the ritual of cleaning LPs with the Discwasher brush and fluid, then destaticizing with the Zerostat gun, then (finally!), placing the disc on the turntable for playback. Of course this was all before the appearance of digital recording and CD playback, when LPs were the only major source of recordings.

All of those rituals were lost with the CD player and CDs. Frankly, I found it liberating to be freed from those vinyl rituals, not to mention the painstaking calibration of tonearm tracking angles.